Exploring the Role of Telehealth in Older Adults' Adherence

Objectives: To analyze the current literature on the impact older patients’ interactions with telehealth have on their adherence and ability to comprehend health information to formulate recommendations for future research. Background: The path to vital healthcare is often a difficult journey for older patients due to transportation barriers. However, telehealth, the remote delivery of medical care via telecoms, provides older patients with enhanced medical accessibility and decreased social isolation. Research on telehealth and older patients focuses primarily on the psychological impacts rather than patients’ comprehension of health information. Therefore, examining the prior literature on older patients’ interactions with telehealth would produce new research on older patients’ medical adherence and health awareness. Methods: To examine the current literature, we generated 432 preliminary articles by entering the following search terms into the Web of Science Core Collection: telehealth, older adults, and adherence. Thereafter, we excluded the articles that primarily focused on other age groups to ensure relevance. Of the articles that remained, we exported the bibliometric data of the 100 most cited sources into Google Sheets for analysis. Results: We examined the 14 most mentioned keywords in the articles and identified two main themes in the literature: the issues telehealth addressed and the intervention type. The first area contained terms like adherence (18 references), diabetes (8 references), and heart failure (7 references). The second category included words like rehabilitation (14 references), exercise (10 references), and mobile health (6 references). Conclusions: Future research could focus on analyzing the themes in the two aforementioned categories to expand the literature on the possible impact telehealth has on older adults’ comprehension of health information. Moreover, scientists could conduct research on new topics, like remote therapy, that are associated with these categories.